"The Sound of Things Falling"
"I was surprised by how little effort it took me to
summon up the words I had spoken or heard, things I'd seen, pain I'd suffered
and now overcome; I was also surprised by the alacrity and dedication we devote
to the damaging exercise of remembering, which, after all, brings nothing good
and serves only to hinder our normal functioning, like those bags of sand
athletes tie around their calves for training."
So the
narrator of this fascinating novel tells us early on, even as he spends much of
the story searching for meaning through memory, through the memory of others.
Vasquez who
recently won the Impac Dublin award for international fiction, seems to wish to
sever the connection between Colombian literature, cemented by the great Garcia
Marquez, and magical realism, replacing it with more literal realism, which he
paints with brunt force and thick brushstrokes. “I want to forget this absurd rhetoric of Latin America as a magical or marvelous continent. In my novel there is a disproportionate reality, but that which is disproportionate in it is the violence and cruelty of our history and of our politics."
A young law
professor in Bogota plays billiards after class with a man named Laverde, who
is rumored to have recently returned from a long prison sentence, but soon
after, Laverde is fatally shot at a bar, with Antonio, the victim of collateral
damage. Antonio has only recently settled into married life because of an
unexpected pregnancy, another of the surprises he contends with as he tries to
make sense of his city's history and future.
We witness
Antonio's desperate determination to discover who Laverde was and why he was
shot, which will take the reader to flashbacks of Laverde's young life and his
love affair and subsequent marriage to an American Peace Corps worker, who was
killed the very same day as the shooting when her flight goes down en route to
Colombia after an eighteen year absence, having returned to the US when
Colombia in the eighties was unsafe for their daughter, Maya. It is Maya who
ultimately holds the key, making it possible for Antonio to deconstruct his
country's violent history and the nature of the drug culture, which, suggested
in this novel, may have been precipitated by Americans from the Peace Corps as
well as CIA.
Vasquez
also deftly weaves historical facts of interest, including a striking depiction
of a zoo established in the 1970's by the dictator Pablo Escobar, which went to
ruin when he passed in the early nineties, and may represent for Vasquez the
trap of the Columbian people.
The novel
is riveting. Elegiac, heart wrenching, but not sentimental, severe without a heavy hand. These younger Latin American writers are bringing a new
literary sensibility to their canon, and while they honor the legacy of masters
like Garcia Marquez, Cervantes, Bolano and Saramago, they offer a fresh
perspective and fresh voices. "A
life unlived, a life that runs through one's fingers, a life one suffers
through while knowing it belongs to someone else: to those who don't have to
suffer."
Read this fabulous novel and be among the first to discover a
spectacular writer.
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